infrastructure

In one of the most significant environmental decisions the Trump administration has taken, a ban on offshore drilling was lifted on 4 January 2018. The New York Times reported: While the plan puts the administration squarely on the side of the energy industry and against environmental groups, it also puts the White House at odds […]

Source: Siyar al-Muluk by Nizam al-Mulk (died, 1092). Translation by Navīd Zarrinnal: “”They say when Umar was about to leave this world, his son asked him: “When will I see you?” Umar replied: “In the next world.” His son said: “I want to see you sooner.” Replied: “the first night, after my death, or on the […]

That extraordinary image is from some time in the 1970s, and the container-ship steaming so serenely in Hudson River is a Jugolinija ship belonging to the Yugoslav national shipping line. What is of course poignant about the image is that neither the shipping line nor the World Trade Center towers exist any longer. I think […]

I am reading a fascinating article about colonial engineering. Canay Ozden’s fabulous “Pontifex Minimus” is about the British engineer of the Low (or old) Aswan Dam, and the article just drips with all sorts of wonderful quotable sections. For example, this: The exportation of engineering practices from the metropole to the colony relied on a […]

As always Paul Rabinow’s French Modern is an extraordinary reminder of how transport infrastructures serve functions at once military and commercial – and in fact “war, commerce, and transit” (in Paul Nizan’s memorable phrase) cannot be prised apart. Here is Rabinow about Gallieni’s pacification of Indochina: There were only the most casual asides about more standard ethnographic […]

From Walter Rodney’s wonderful How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, this passage on the making of infrastructures in Africa: The combination of being oppressed, being exploited, and being disregarded is best illustrated by the pattern of the economic infrastructure of African colonies : notably, their roads and railways. These had a clear geographical distribution according to the extent […]

GUEST POST BY R.Z. Having spent the last couple of years researching Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs), attending their industry gatherings and military expos, I was very excited to shift gears to a new project and curious what differences I would find in the world of Middle East logistics. On 17-18 March I attended […]

Leopold Lambert’s brilliant blog has a new entry about the submarine internet structure. It is well worth a careful peruse, especially because of its brilliant maps. It also contains loads of fascinating insight: A particularity of this [submarine cable] network is that it tends to reproduce the existing territorial organization of maritime ports, rather than […]

15 February 2015 16.00 We have arrived too soon, because of steaming at high speed through the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, in order for the ship to make it to Ningbo for an earlier slot that has come free, but now the slot has been given up for Chinese […]

“and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick The first incident of its kind happened last night. Hopefully, also the last. I was in the wheelroom in the dark, keeping easy company with my favourite ship’s officer and favourite cadet. One of the below-deck officers who had […]